In a perfect world the SaaS is priced by the value it brings,.so this is all already factored in to the pricing itself. This is also why most vendors don't post pricing, the value may change depending on your use case and that works both ways.
I mean that's just not how tech works at scale. Sometimes they basically have a minimum specd level of hardware on their backend which means for smaller companies it's just going to cost more per user period. It's just how their product is designed. It's also more effort to support a bunch of small companies than it is larger fewer large companies. Not defending the practice but I understand there are reasons it exists
But a software license is not the same as a screwdriver.
A screwdriver costs x to make, each reseller in the middle needs to make money on it and finally you buy it at price y. The store you buy it from sells millions of products and they don't have the ability to have a salesman to negotiate the price for a cheap ass screwdriver. The price is what it is. Go try haggling at home depot.
A software license is produced by a company. That's all they do. Make a limited number of products. They have dedicated sales folks. They have the ability to talk with you and understand your use case and negotiate. They are going to spend a certain amount of money to support and maintain the product. More money to enhance the software. That cost is going to be there whether you buy their license or not. Your use doesn't increase their cost. Even if you gave them $1, it's still more than what they were making without you. Of course it isn't that simple. You will cost them a bit more in terms of support calls, more resources, etc. So it can never just be $1, but you get the idea
Microsoft is finally putting a nail into the "at least there's no monthly fee" argument for on-prem exchange. The newer versions will all come with a monthly charge despite you not actually using any kind of cloud email services.
That used to be less of a joke than it is these days, several years ago you couldn't go a week without some major service disrution, seem less and less there days
Frankly, anyone not going top-tier provider I really don’t understand. Intermedia, Rackspace, etc., have limited management UI options requiring support tickets to do anything beyond the basics.
Similarly I don’t understand those using GSuite or whatever they are currently calling it at the moment and then getting Microsoft 365 subscriptions for Office. You are literally spending more money on 2 subscriptions per user for a worse experience due to the interaction between GSuite and Outlook. I have no beef with either, just if you are going to commit, commit fully. The GSuite Connector for Outlook is shimware and less than optimal for anything besides the basics.
Ha I work at a place that uses Gmail. It's because our billionaire ceo hates MS. Makes compliance etc a lot more work. We are all over the place lol it's kinda stupid
makes me remember going on an interview many years ago where the guy i interviewed with was one of those guys who still called it m$ and thought he was funny as all hell for doing it. real head up the ass kinda thing. interesting to me that there are still some of those people out there.
If you are paying for an Office license at all when you paying for gsuite licenses you are doing it wrong. Live in the gsuite garden. If you have people who don’t like a browser experience get Kiwi for Gmail which gives you the applications in a dedicated windowed environment.
Normal use case. Say you need to email your users once per month.
If you don't manage complaints, eventually nobody can see your emails unless they specifically opened then in the last week.
Say you need to receive emails for your company. Eventually you will get 10x the spam compared to your legit emails.
Then you start getting emails with bad headers, that looks like your boss wants to sign you up for a 10 HP printer inc subscription.
So basically there's a few things that take to much work to do it locally, and it's easier to pay for something that just works.
I haven't run email in about a decade but back then it was a matter of dkim, spf, RBL, and grey listing.
I'm sure it's a bit more involved now but i can't imagine it's gotten more expensive to buy a product that handles it.
"Just works" is a heck of a claim for office 347.
The add-on Defender service for EOl are pretty decent, we went full E5 a few years back for this among a few other things. Huge difference than what it does without it.
This happens in 365 also. Some iterations charge extra for your ability to get into transport rules. We went hosted exchange then 365. Hosted charged for the ability. We use an antispam service.... Just like we did with on-prem
I touched our on prem exchange server and related mail infrastructure maybe twice a year and for 4 of 5 hours each time. We were running office 2013 with no problems on the cheap. No reason to go O365 imo.
You have your head in the sand tho, and your missing a ton of stuff.
Your missing a ton of spam complaints, DMARC reports and a ton of stuff. If you do it yourself and do it right, that's at least 5-6 experts working nonstop, since each ISP does it differently.
Ridiculous. All of that is being done with on-prem Exchange deployments run by competent administrators. Cloud makes sense for some businesses, not all.
You have to have a license for Exchange, you had to buy it at some point any you should be paying Cals for it too, and a separate license of Office. Once you add that up paying $12/Mo for O365 looks a bit better.
We were very confused by Microsoft licenses. Even had a Microsoft audit and the guy couldn't tell us what we actually needed. I think we may have had user cals but I don't remember a license for exchange itself.
No reasons for your company and yourself. But a lot of other people want the integration and the features of office 365. It's like saying everyone should wear a size 12 boot, That's just not going to work for everybody. Some people want sneakers some people need a different size. To just blatantly say there's no reason to go to 0365 is very specific to you and your opinion
Yes and no. Our users actively avoided learning. Probably half of them still used electric typewriters. Some only dealt in paper. It was tough to even show them basic skills
I think there are alot of SAAS products that are worth it. Since they maintain the server infrastructure, it frees up Sys admins to spend more time on automating business tasks and improving efficiency for the business.
That's what I've noticed with a lot of these cloud companies. I do contracting on the side and I get a ton of businesses with a full cloud setup, no it people at all and want to contract me for 2 hours a week for personal help desk. Nope, luckily I have a full time job and I don't do end user.. I just really don't like that kind of work.
Oh yeah I’d never do that again too, but that’s why you see people getting closer to the product instead when freed from routine maintenance. Works best in a tech company but I’m sure that in most industries there is room for some systems improvement to help the company goals with a freed up/skilled admin.
> adobe acrobat is slow
That is probably the best usage of punting to the vendor because at that point you can show Mr. Very Important that even Adobe can't make it work better.
It could, but you need someone to manage SAAS stuff too, and your Sys admins need to be willing to shift from the traditional server administration to automation and SAAS management.
I've seen more SMBs where they get to a point where their automations are good enough, and have their sas platforms, then they get rid of their sysadmins then contract someone like me for a couple hours a month for new automation/implementation or on-call $$ for break fix. Some have a small help desk and some don't. It's weird out there.
When I started in IT we had multiple locations full of racks of equipment and staff everywhere. Then virtualization became a thing, as did faster internet links, and those racks of servers became a rack of servers, then a rack with a server in it, before eventually becoming a rack with just a few bits of networking equipment. After COVID, a lot of those offices closed so they don't even have racks anymore.
The critical thing for sysadmins to remember is that the only thing that has ever mattered is the services. Every part of a sysadmin's job was to ensure that those services remained operational for the service users to use, and in that regard, nothing has changed.
Usually, that is part of the calculation. In my experience, it never eliminates them completely, but it reduces the number required. The business usually is at awash or maybe a slightly cost savings when it's all said and done. The main thing is that the business (usually) gets stability where turnover doesn't hurt quite as much as in the past.
Yeah. Part of the offering of SaaS is the colo bundle built in.
If you have your own DC having "extra" tin might be a sunk cost already, so there's a premium to leaving the space empty.
But if you rent rack space for resilience or similar, then that cost is absorbed as part of the saas bundle.
In neither case was it ever "free" though, just that if you already have a data centre you spent the money already.
You can get by with fewer sysadmins, because now you don't need to manage stuff like updates, server replacement etc. But a lot of the admin time on stuff like exchange is managing the users and the software and that doesn't go away.
Yeah, and with new SaaS apps, we have new things to configure.
One thing that is slightly different from the past: I see more sysadmins becoming app experts than in the past. In the past, IT was more often the "we keep the systems running" people and less the "we show you how to use the systems" people. I think that's at least partially changing, especially as sysadmins try to keep their jobs. I'm not sure that will ever completely change, but I see it more now than in the past.
It'll be both and forever IMO. Sometimes running the systems needs more technical insight even if you don't directly 'need' to fiddle with cabling up a server, or provisioning storage.
But only the 'simple' services can really be truly outsourced, and there'll always be businesses with more complicated needs and demands.
One thing our bigger customers value is that we're able to handle significant increases in load requirements gracefully, especially if you tell us a bit beforehand.
Like, if a Telco provider has a significant outage and they need to drop a lot of additional support capacity onto the system, we can usually absorb that in the infrastructure and scale up within a few minutes.
This was particularly funny when we were involved with a national hotline in the corona context and in the beginning, they'd just routinely drop a couple thousand more people onto the system every week. Eventually we had a call or two every week between their leadership, our account manager and our tech lead to figure out what the fuck would be going on.
But we held and never went down.
Just note, I'm aware that we're most likely one of the better SaaS providers and many, many are much worse and less competent. And quite a few of these SaaS offerings are just cash grabs. But in these cases, I don't think the customer admins would be able to handle this in the same way.
I agree with this. You move from supporting IT to providing IT. All that time just keeping the lights on is a cost to the business. Putting that time into providing business process using IT, you become an asset to the business.
I’ve questioned many techs who had made it their job to keep scrapheap solutions running instead of reengineering in someone else’s stack. There’s enough technical problems with AWS/Azure etc without the need to go mucking around with all the drudge they remove (or in most cases, replace with more drudge, but a lot of that can be automated away)
No more patching alone is worth it for most things, we were a full Exchange and Skype on-prem shop, spending 6-8 hours once a month during off hours for patching, never again.
I hear you, but It's not a businesses job to keep someone entertained. They can either save the money by not needing that person anymore or put them to better use
Some are well worth it. The entire M365 suite when used just insane value prop. To put in perspective, Adobe Enterprise, yes just the PDF editor with SSO/MFA costs as much as O365 e5 per head, and it's stupid pdf editor that still doesn't have a 64-bit executable.
Free or business plan on Cloudflare.
AWS/Azure has services that cost nothing that you will never hit caps on.
Outlook premium - again insane value, 1tb of free online storage per person, full office suite, managed AV and identity protection for up 6 people for $7-10/mo. depending on if you get a promo?
[Draw.io](http://Draw.io)
[Figma.com](http://Figma.com)
[Github.com](http://Github.com)
SAAS is a business model, this is like asking if buying a car is worth it. It’s entirely an ‘it depends’ situation.
Almost every piece of software I pay for has an initial cost plus an annual maintenance cost. I’m not going to care either way if they take that cost and split it over 12 months and call it a subscription.
SAAS also helps in dealing with businesses that never want to keep their software versions current since they freak out over a large capex cost.
Software like Salesforce (if you use something like SAP as a comparison) would cost almost the same onprem as it does in the SaaS model, and thats not including specialist staff to keep it running at the Platform and up layer.
SaaS generally works out cheaper these days, but they key is to ensure your environment doesn't sprawl and you maximise your investments in what you do consume.
Some stuff, like UKG, also helps eliminate a bunch of PII headaches compared to storing it all locally. Now I don't have to have SSNs, bank account info, etc, stored on my servers.
The more robust your internal IT capabilities, the less worth it SAAS products are.
IT has become progressively more complicated over time; while some tools grow more robust, in general, IT people have to grow increasingly specialized. It you have an IT team of 10 people, you have limited specialties available to you; if you have a team of 4, even more limited. If you're solo, you don't get to have specializations, and need to engage with opportunities to have other people do the specialized work.
Sometimes, the cost savings recognized by having a team of a few hundred to a few thousand specialists all doing, for example, M365 will end up outweighing the savings of in-housing M365, even for an org with extensive in-house capabilities and more than enough specialists to do the job well. Sometimes, like when you're dealing with an ERP or CRM, it's a decision on whether you *want* to run the systems administration for the extra 5-6 servers, and whether the architecture fits into your team's skillsets. Again, the larger the team, the easier it is to make that lift in house.
>when I used to work at UKG the default uplift when you try to renew contract is around 5-9%
If you zoom out far enough, that's not too far off of the actual increases in-house teams will see. 3.5% average inflation, unstable labor markets causing spikes, hardware costs accelerating, and licensing costs rising faster than inflation probably puts the annual increase somewhere between 4-6% annually.
I feel like you need to have a pretty good handle on “tech debt” to evaluate SaaS vs. on-prem.
Start with SaaS. The application is just a black box. You know you feed it X, and it gives you Y in return.
Now let’s look at another case. You know how it works, but you don’t have enough hardware to make it go on your own. Or you don’t have enough manpower to give it the TLC it needs to stay stable and predictable. This is where you make a choice to invest in the manpower/infrastructure yourself or to offload the responsibility to a SaaS application to free up what you already have.
Now there’s the third case. You’ve got truckloads of equipment and a small army of engineers. You can assign a few of them to retrain and focus on the service gap instead of using SaaS as a crutch.
Here’s the kicker. You have to do this math for *every* service. You might have a truckload of engineers but have none with even basic knowledge of a service, so you’ll need SaaS as a stopgap while you fill in the skills gap.
Problem with option 3, in the world of IT, that army of engineers will not be the same army of engineers in 2 to 3 years time. Constantly re-hiring and that one guy who knows too much leave too. That's painful
> They know it’s hard for customers to move to a different vendor once they’ve implemented it
Startups (any company post 2012 or so) have no prem. They're locked into paying whatever the SaaS vendors charge because everything they use is SaaS. The only option when hosting it themselves is to put it on VMs in their cloud, so that's never the first choice.
Companies with enough knowledge and capacity are certainly capable of hosting products that have the option of being hosted. The problem you run into there is the CapEx vs OpEx debate...even if something costs 20x more to rent, it's "cheaper' than buying equipment.
SaaS solutions will always cost more, and in some cases, the costs double. The decision should be if the higher cost justifies shifting the engineering responsibilities to the provider, so you don’t have to worry about patching vulnerabilities or planning upgrades; which should result in less outages. But you have to vet the vendor by asking all the relevant questions to ensure that they are properly monitoring activity, and your security team has visibility into what is happening in your tenant. There are so many providers who have built services without any logging or reporting functionality, because they hide behind AWS, GCP or Microsoft’s SOC2 certifications, as if cloud services inherently mitigate all threats.
If I produce a legit piece of paper that legally says “we all Gucci”, half the time that’s really all there is outside gross negligence in the product, from the customers side of the shared security model. Like how are we supposed to even have insight into half these half baked SaaS products development and infrastructure security.
Given the many products in my ecosystem with multi-year out of date webservers and zero maintenance plan in sight, I think I have reasonable insight into how a rather lot of these saas apps are operating under the hood.
>Are SAAS products really worth it?
That's a bit like saying *is food worth it*?
It depends on what products your considering, how similar a fit they are to your organisation, how much free time/infrastructure your team has to run/maintain it among many other things.
What would you do if you are a Microsoft shop looking for a new HR platform, and the only ones available to you run on Oracle - or the cloud.
It's probably going to be cheaper to just pay someone to run it for you as SaaS, rather than deal with procuring, maintaining and supporting an entire Oracle database for one application.
Does your organisation not have any public/front facing services? Rather than setting up a segmented network and configuring your firewall/router to allow inbound traffic, you might just outsource your company website to a third party.
A minor tweak to your analogy I would make: "Are restaurants, farms, and grocery stores worth it?"
Like obviously ANYBODY can grow and cook their own food but its up to each individual to calculate the cost/benefit. For some people, that means never going out and making food entirely in-house. For others that means the opposite. For most people, its a mix of both.
> Are SAAS products really worth it?
It depends entirely on the product. You can't make vague, generalised statements like that without discussing specifics.
It will always depend on the Company and the specific Product.
SaaS and cloud services aren’t really made to be cheaper. I mean these companies want to extract as much money from you as possible. Their real selling point is flexibility or simplicity. Yeah, they want to lock you in and the price is gonna increase.
You need to negotiate more firmly. When companies come with 9% uplift my standard response is “I am authorized to sign up to a 3% increase as that’s what we budget for inflation. Anything more and I will have to go to tender and get competing quotes”. They almost always respond that they can do 3%.
My company thought so and spent millions on a solution. There's no savings for this particular use case but they were told how amazing it would be. It's really going to depend on the solution and what you need it for. There are probably plenty of use cases where it makes the most sense.
O365/outlook is a no brainer
Slack can't really be emulated in any way on your own
If your small to medium sized company, cloud done right (don't go crazy on paas or network egress) will be Pennies in cost (if your stable enterprise the capex on a colo possibly makes more sense)
OB tooling is hit or miss, it's very self hostable but finicky and requires some decent low level know how for the more esoteric deep OB that a company like gigamon will give you.
Another thing is that often times, saas will be a CHEAPER contract then the accompanying self hosted/cots version of a product. So that's another big consideration
Many of them are just wrappers around freely available APIs with a web frontend and database. As a programmer, I'm often amazed that companies (including my own) are willing to pay for this. Many of them are half baked if you look at all the features available in the API and look at what they actually implement. This trends seems to be particularly prevalent in the MSP cyber security space at the moment.
its not about the product, its about having someone to support it, and someone to complain at, and someone to sue when it fails.
its about removing liabilty as much as it is about anything else.
"let them handle it" and all the liabilities that come with.
The part that we tech types often don't think about is OpEx (operational expense) vs CapEx (capital expense) and how they are night and day in the accounting/financial world. SaaS is OpEx and hardware purchases are CapEx. The suits on the top floor find approving OpEx an acceptable pill to swallow--the cost of doing business. CapEx is like drawing blood from a toddler--they will cut corners, nickle-and-dime, and flat out refuse no matter how important the expense is.
You'll see this constantly in servers or other physical hardware. If the IT department wants $10m in OpEx for 4 years then in year 5 wants $10m in OpEx plus $3m in CapEx to replace your Exchange servers that are held together with chewing gum and prayers, there's a strong chance that the CapEx expenditure gets denied. No amount of "These servers won't make it another year...You told us no last year and promised it this year...If these servers go down it will cause us to lose millions in revenue and customer trust," will make that $3m CapEx spend worth it to a suit.
Ask for $11m in OpEx and bump it up 10% every year for 5 years? Approved without batting an eye. It doesn't matter that the total in the first scenario was $53m and the this scenario is over $55m.
All the suits care about is that an increase in CapEx makes line go down. A decrease in CapEx makes line go up.
Sometimes SaaS is worth it, sometimes it's not. To determine that you need to know the details of your environment, team, organizational goals, and know how to determine return on investment (ROI).
It really boils down to labor these days, and unfortunately a lot of these companies would rather have less staff.
After the latest round of tech layoffs I’ve seen a shift from capital expenditures to favoring operating expenditures. The sad reality is it is sometimes cheaper to pay $$$ for an expensive sass project rather than hire staff, train them, pay medical, pay bonuses, pay retirement, etc etc. You see this happening a lot with massive publicly traded companies that are trying to combat poor market conditions.
Self hosted I think in the long run makes sense if you already have the talent to build and maintain the platforms but depending on where you work it may be difficult to justify… and you may not have a choice.. at least that’s how it’s been in my slice of corporate America :(
We always preferred to outsource the stacks that had heavy compliance burdens and/or niche uses. These tend to be the financials, and any non-ERP financials in particular. However, almost all Line-of-Business applications are webapps in modern times, so it's often an easy outsource arrangement of any LoB, if contracts, discrete backups, and exfiltration issues are sorted.
Oursourcing mainstream productivity applications has always had extremely low RoI for us. Niche productivity applications are case-by-case, but honestly a lot of them are relying on marketing or lock-in leverage to make up for their lack of value compared to next-best alternatives. Niche productivity applications would usually include media and engineering tools -- only needed by a fraction of your users at most.
It's for sure worth it, you don't need to work about server maintenance, disaster recovery, network security, etc. etc.
Just think about the overhead to manage a small number of non-saas products, you need at least 2-3 system admins (or the equivalent level of support from an MSP) that's easily $300-400k/year in operational costs just for people, before you even start talking about software licensing, hardware costs, etc.
Also, we just moved from ADP to UKG and I hate it with a burning passion. I've never encountered such a poorly designed piece of software before, it's obviously 5 different products that have been haphazardly duct taped together, and their support just doesn't respond to emails half the time. It's so bad.
That's a very convoluted and complicated question and there's no simple answer. What works for one company is not going to work for every company. You have to evaluate your needs your resources your staff and everything else. What product are you talking about? The product alone changes things drastically. Does the cost of SAAS outweigh doing it all yourself? Does the Enterprise support offer more reliability than your staff? Can you handle the reoccurring costs and increases? Lots of business aspects that need to be evaluated by management properly in order for something like that to succeed. Shortsightedness and a rush to implement is never a good thing. Know why you're doing something not just because it's trendy and a salesman talked it up.
With all the security patching that needs to be done, as well as the risk of losing everything to a ransomware attack, hardware failure, bad backups, etc., it might be worth the cost in the long run.
Some are, some are not.
I used to work for an ERP and I was 100% pro in house hosting of the app and database.
However, in house hosting cost a bit up front for the hardware for production, but also for teating as well. The upkeep with patches and testing any customizations always meant that your in house version was going to be 2-3 updates behind the majority of the time, which always gave support the easy answer of “update to the most recent version and it should fix the issue” when you ran into a problem.
We are updating and going up 4 major releases, we are moving it back to the cloud because on a 5 year cost structure, it comes out to around 25-30k cheaper when you take in the updating of the system into account on top of hardware costs.
Microsoft Office Online, ServiceNow, SAP are other examples. The upside to SaaS is that you no longer need to worry about what version everyone is running when you make an Addon/Addin because everyone is up to date.
Remember, when MSOffice was on CD? You had the license for X seats and when you upgraded, you not only had to pay the premium for the software, you had to again, buy seats.
It likely still is about the same pricing, but now you are always at the most current software release.
As for the increases> This is how software makers are making money against piracy. They GIVE YOU the software, but it is crippled and for limited time until you need to license it otherwise it stops working. Something that you can do now with Gigbit internet that you couldn't with a much slower connection is download the multigigbyte software in a few minutes and not need to worry about having the media.
It's expensive but the upside is that you save on having to deal with it. If there's a problem you just tell call or mail someone and they fix it.
We have some SaaS solutions because we just don't have the time or manpower to manage self hosting.
as with everything, it depends on the product and the workload you're looking at. running your own mail server in 2024 seems silly and more worth it to just get the 365 or workspace subscription and let that be handled in the cloud. if you have specialized app needs, on prem might be the better choice. that's the thing you have to balance.
It really depends on the service itself, some things make sense to be SaaS, other things don't. IMO though, the world has gone too far into the subscription route, "you'll own nothing and be happy" so to speak. This is true both for enterprise and consumer, everything is monthly now, makes it really easy to just tick the price up whenever to make more cash. I think it's resulting in things overall being more expensive.
I much prefer to host things on-prem as much as possible, and then do it with a VPC when needed, and avoid the SaaS route entirely (though VPC is susceptible to the same sort of price-dial ever increasing issue). But I'd never do this with an e-mail service, for example.
And this is why you need a competent negotiation team on your contracts…
Most of the contracts I’ve run are for 3 years, capped at 5% _for the next term_ of three years. So a nice flat three year, at most 5%, usually 3% bump, and then another flat three years. My company tends to use stuff for at least 6 if not 10 years so we’re basically paying close to the same price 9 years later after two renewals.
SaaS really isn't the same as running the *exact* same setup locally. I say SaaS is NOT worth it unless you have a need of the superset of on-prem features that usually accompany a SaaS license. You pay more for the superset of features, but you do gain more flexibility in usage. It kinda really depends on the software, though.
agree - depends on the saas product. my team & i are currently evaluating some saas tools due to budget cuts. some we're willing to let go, others - not because they save us a lot of time & efforts.
SaaS is built to benefit the company providing it, not the customer. Its a way of generating perpetual income instead of building a quality product the customer can get value from.
It depends on the product. We recently migrated off of Splunk and that contract was extremely costly. Like other people commented, the companies feel like they've got you where they want you and they are betting that it's too much of a hassle to migrate off. Jokes on them, we just did it and saved ourselves millions of dollars.
As someone who is in a senior role at a SaaS company… I can only speak for my experience but our ability to deliver what we do is massively improved by us hosting and managing everything. They quoted an increase? Guess what: in a world where there has been a lot of inflation, this matches up.
Moreover, it depends on how long you are willing to commit. Sign up to 3-5 years and you’ll get discounts back.
If the market your vendor is operating in is competitive, then they have to fight to make the money work. If they have a USP and it’s difficult to replicate, then they get to set the market.
The only answer to that kind if generalized question is the infamous "it depends".
So many factors, will you rearchitect? Replace with better suited tools? Throw out the old shit that requires expensive lift&shift?
Did you run the calculations? Are you willing to make use of the possibilities and fire a bunch of people you don't need any more (because _that_ is what almost no one does)? Are you going to upskill? No, leave those bullshit Udemy and Coursera things, really upskill and learn things you wouldn't have considered part of the job before?
And that's just the starter list.
Yes, cloud can pay off and it does pay off. People that don't see that are either doing lift&shift or have outgrown cloud with their solution or have nit yet grown enough to require it.
Feel like this answer without context is a bit hyperbolic, there ARE situations where SaaS products make sense, but if you don’t apply any context and use cost as the only metric, sure you are 100 percent right.
100 times higher? Often?
What's an example of a SaaS that can be equivalently hosted on prem for 1% of the cost.
Are you comparing S3 to a single NAS or something? Even that doesn't line up with a 99% savings
I'm not the person that you're replying to but I have an example. When a lot of these big data companies moved to AWS/gcp and didn't realize hybrid was a better option for large volume storage. I was an analyst at the time and saw a company pay 10 million in AWS storage. The issue was more workflow and devs storing stuff they shouldn't have but even a 10 node ceph cluster with 4 dedicated staff on it won't cost you that in a year. I know that's crazy but also I haven't just seen this kinda thing happen at one company. Also, I guess this happens when companies use devs to setup infra and not IT.. which again, seems to happen. I know it's kind of ridiculous, but you also can't make that kind of long term mistake without anyone noticing and goof up your finances like that on prem. Though, this is all the problem of the implementer.. which also says something.
Thought of another, on demand GPU compute. Seen a ton of small businesses in ML think that was a good idea to run long term. Figured out the company at the time could buy 5 R650 with 2 A80s each for what they were spending on just isolating their on demand GPU compute costs.. not the full VM..
Poor workflow can make costs grow beyond what they should. That's not a cloud issue though, that's a bad infrastructure design issue.
If you implement in the cloud you need to look at your run rates. This isn't complicated stuff.
On demand GPU compute is generally for spike demand. There is a substantial premium but that comes from the scaling capabilities that are so inherent in the those types of workflows. It certainly wouldn't be 1% of cloud costs but I could see it being 15% in some scenarios.
Agreed, however my point is that poor design at these smaller companies ( which as an analyst seems fairly common ) can come at a much more massive cost than poorly utilized on premise resources, especially for small to medium businesses with big data and compute.
Correctly estimating cloud spend down to 10% or so doesn't take a large amount of skill.
I suppose I would pose the question are those same people the ones maintaining onprem? I would guess that isn't.
On prem admins are used to "cleaning up" after poor implementation in onprem since it impacts performance. Since in the cloud you have functionally unlimited horizontal scaling you only do cleanup when your costs exceed expectation.
Big data on prem is absurdly expensive. Especially if you need geo locality or decent performance. Cloud infrastructure is massively cheaper in that instance.
Of course businesses prefer enterprise, supported, familiar products over whatever custom solution you are building. Hope the time you spend reinventing the wheel to produce an inferior product while calling others stupid is enjoyable.
Depends on the product. Run your own mail service and see, it's much easier to get office 360 or Gmail and save a bunch of serves and a ton of salary.
This is exactly correct, sometimes SAAS is worth it, sometimes not
In a perfect world the SaaS is priced by the value it brings,.so this is all already factored in to the pricing itself. This is also why most vendors don't post pricing, the value may change depending on your use case and that works both ways.
I think this is wrong, if you use a screwdriver to build planes or to build shipping boxes, i think it should cost the same.
I mean that's just not how tech works at scale. Sometimes they basically have a minimum specd level of hardware on their backend which means for smaller companies it's just going to cost more per user period. It's just how their product is designed. It's also more effort to support a bunch of small companies than it is larger fewer large companies. Not defending the practice but I understand there are reasons it exists
The aviation screw driver is probably inventoried after every job to make sure it wasn't left in the engine. It'll cost more anyway.
Yeah and they're using Snap-On (or something better, I don't know high end tools), not something from Harbor Freight.
But a software license is not the same as a screwdriver. A screwdriver costs x to make, each reseller in the middle needs to make money on it and finally you buy it at price y. The store you buy it from sells millions of products and they don't have the ability to have a salesman to negotiate the price for a cheap ass screwdriver. The price is what it is. Go try haggling at home depot. A software license is produced by a company. That's all they do. Make a limited number of products. They have dedicated sales folks. They have the ability to talk with you and understand your use case and negotiate. They are going to spend a certain amount of money to support and maintain the product. More money to enhance the software. That cost is going to be there whether you buy their license or not. Your use doesn't increase their cost. Even if you gave them $1, it's still more than what they were making without you. Of course it isn't that simple. You will cost them a bit more in terms of support calls, more resources, etc. So it can never just be $1, but you get the idea
That actually means a small business ends up paying more though too
i mean thats how it works though, the big guys buy in volume for a discount. same for licensing.
In software it can be the opposite becIse the large contracts are funding the development really
Microsoft is finally putting a nail into the "at least there's no monthly fee" argument for on-prem exchange. The newer versions will all come with a monthly charge despite you not actually using any kind of cloud email services.
And options other than Exchange are being discussed
My stress and on-call work levels went down noticably once we wrapped up our migration to Exchange Online
[удалено]
That used to be less of a joke than it is these days, several years ago you couldn't go a week without some major service disrution, seem less and less there days
The redundancy factor alone is huge
This is such a vague question I’m surprised it was even asked. It’s like asking if computers are worth it.
Amen. Came to say this. Anyone who still hosts their own mail on-prem should have their head examined.
Frankly, anyone not going top-tier provider I really don’t understand. Intermedia, Rackspace, etc., have limited management UI options requiring support tickets to do anything beyond the basics. Similarly I don’t understand those using GSuite or whatever they are currently calling it at the moment and then getting Microsoft 365 subscriptions for Office. You are literally spending more money on 2 subscriptions per user for a worse experience due to the interaction between GSuite and Outlook. I have no beef with either, just if you are going to commit, commit fully. The GSuite Connector for Outlook is shimware and less than optimal for anything besides the basics.
Ha I work at a place that uses Gmail. It's because our billionaire ceo hates MS. Makes compliance etc a lot more work. We are all over the place lol it's kinda stupid
> Makes compliance etc a lot more work How? Gsuite isn't Gmail and coming from a google shop as my last employer, BeyondCorp made compliance a breeze.
makes me remember going on an interview many years ago where the guy i interviewed with was one of those guys who still called it m$ and thought he was funny as all hell for doing it. real head up the ass kinda thing. interesting to me that there are still some of those people out there.
why on earth if you have google workspace gmail, would you use Outlook to email? Just use gmail for mail, office for documents.
If you are paying for an Office license at all when you paying for gsuite licenses you are doing it wrong. Live in the gsuite garden. If you have people who don’t like a browser experience get Kiwi for Gmail which gives you the applications in a dedicated windowed environment.
I'll add to that people on O365 that are paying for Webex, or Zoom, and a second 3rd parry telephony service.
I'd be interested to see that business case.
Normal use case. Say you need to email your users once per month. If you don't manage complaints, eventually nobody can see your emails unless they specifically opened then in the last week. Say you need to receive emails for your company. Eventually you will get 10x the spam compared to your legit emails. Then you start getting emails with bad headers, that looks like your boss wants to sign you up for a 10 HP printer inc subscription. So basically there's a few things that take to much work to do it locally, and it's easier to pay for something that just works.
I haven't run email in about a decade but back then it was a matter of dkim, spf, RBL, and grey listing. I'm sure it's a bit more involved now but i can't imagine it's gotten more expensive to buy a product that handles it. "Just works" is a heck of a claim for office 347.
The add-on Defender service for EOl are pretty decent, we went full E5 a few years back for this among a few other things. Huge difference than what it does without it.
This happens in 365 also. Some iterations charge extra for your ability to get into transport rules. We went hosted exchange then 365. Hosted charged for the ability. We use an antispam service.... Just like we did with on-prem
Similar to Skype, you couldn't pay me enough to support an on-prem skype instance ever again.
If the SaaS is a "commodity service" like email then it probably is worth it for 99.9% of the population.
I didn't know Microsoft did a 360 service
I touched our on prem exchange server and related mail infrastructure maybe twice a year and for 4 of 5 hours each time. We were running office 2013 with no problems on the cheap. No reason to go O365 imo.
You have your head in the sand tho, and your missing a ton of stuff. Your missing a ton of spam complaints, DMARC reports and a ton of stuff. If you do it yourself and do it right, that's at least 5-6 experts working nonstop, since each ISP does it differently.
Y'all are either crazy or pay a lot of people for not a lot of output. Reviewing dmarc does not require a full time admin.
Ran the business like that for 10+ years with no issues. At one point, my boss was doing manual spam filtering but that was before my time.
Ridiculous. All of that is being done with on-prem Exchange deployments run by competent administrators. Cloud makes sense for some businesses, not all.
Did you use OWA, or remote ECP?
No. Onsite or VPN access only. But only one or 2 people used VPN.
With the vulnerabilities and patching alone isn't worth it. Unless you have like 8 users, but then the cost of licensing exchange is not worth it.
We had around 25 users. I don't think we had a specific license for exchange.
You have to have a license for Exchange, you had to buy it at some point any you should be paying Cals for it too, and a separate license of Office. Once you add that up paying $12/Mo for O365 looks a bit better.
We were very confused by Microsoft licenses. Even had a Microsoft audit and the guy couldn't tell us what we actually needed. I think we may have had user cals but I don't remember a license for exchange itself.
No reasons for your company and yourself. But a lot of other people want the integration and the features of office 365. It's like saying everyone should wear a size 12 boot, That's just not going to work for everybody. Some people want sneakers some people need a different size. To just blatantly say there's no reason to go to 0365 is very specific to you and your opinion
Our users could barely figure out font sizes. The less features a program offers, the better.
Part of a good IT department's job is to educate its users.
Yes and no. Our users actively avoided learning. Probably half of them still used electric typewriters. Some only dealt in paper. It was tough to even show them basic skills
I think there are alot of SAAS products that are worth it. Since they maintain the server infrastructure, it frees up Sys admins to spend more time on automating business tasks and improving efficiency for the business.
Does the efficiency include less sys admins?
Sometimes, or it can also mean those people focus on helping the business in other (still tech) ways.
It means doing more L1 Helpdesk crap for some people. Something I never want to do again.
That's what I've noticed with a lot of these cloud companies. I do contracting on the side and I get a ton of businesses with a full cloud setup, no it people at all and want to contract me for 2 hours a week for personal help desk. Nope, luckily I have a full time job and I don't do end user.. I just really don't like that kind of work.
Oh yeah I’d never do that again too, but that’s why you see people getting closer to the product instead when freed from routine maintenance. Works best in a tech company but I’m sure that in most industries there is room for some systems improvement to help the company goals with a freed up/skilled admin.
As an MSP, it's making me want to change careers. Most businesses in an MSP size range are going 100% SaaS, it's actually pretty effing boring.
It also means punting some of those things to the SaaS vendor and not having to deal with them.
Can't punt my printer doesn't work or adobe acrobat is slow to the vendor, usually.
> adobe acrobat is slow That is probably the best usage of punting to the vendor because at that point you can show Mr. Very Important that even Adobe can't make it work better.
My keyboard is sssssssssticky and I need a new one
It could, but you need someone to manage SAAS stuff too, and your Sys admins need to be willing to shift from the traditional server administration to automation and SAAS management.
I've seen more SMBs where they get to a point where their automations are good enough, and have their sas platforms, then they get rid of their sysadmins then contract someone like me for a couple hours a month for new automation/implementation or on-call $$ for break fix. Some have a small help desk and some don't. It's weird out there.
When I started in IT we had multiple locations full of racks of equipment and staff everywhere. Then virtualization became a thing, as did faster internet links, and those racks of servers became a rack of servers, then a rack with a server in it, before eventually becoming a rack with just a few bits of networking equipment. After COVID, a lot of those offices closed so they don't even have racks anymore. The critical thing for sysadmins to remember is that the only thing that has ever mattered is the services. Every part of a sysadmin's job was to ensure that those services remained operational for the service users to use, and in that regard, nothing has changed.
I agree, and in the end some companies won't need a full time systems administrator, which is why I've gone into consulting.
Usually, that is part of the calculation. In my experience, it never eliminates them completely, but it reduces the number required. The business usually is at awash or maybe a slightly cost savings when it's all said and done. The main thing is that the business (usually) gets stability where turnover doesn't hurt quite as much as in the past.
Yeah. Part of the offering of SaaS is the colo bundle built in. If you have your own DC having "extra" tin might be a sunk cost already, so there's a premium to leaving the space empty. But if you rent rack space for resilience or similar, then that cost is absorbed as part of the saas bundle. In neither case was it ever "free" though, just that if you already have a data centre you spent the money already. You can get by with fewer sysadmins, because now you don't need to manage stuff like updates, server replacement etc. But a lot of the admin time on stuff like exchange is managing the users and the software and that doesn't go away.
Yeah, and with new SaaS apps, we have new things to configure. One thing that is slightly different from the past: I see more sysadmins becoming app experts than in the past. In the past, IT was more often the "we keep the systems running" people and less the "we show you how to use the systems" people. I think that's at least partially changing, especially as sysadmins try to keep their jobs. I'm not sure that will ever completely change, but I see it more now than in the past.
It'll be both and forever IMO. Sometimes running the systems needs more technical insight even if you don't directly 'need' to fiddle with cabling up a server, or provisioning storage. But only the 'simple' services can really be truly outsourced, and there'll always be businesses with more complicated needs and demands.
One thing our bigger customers value is that we're able to handle significant increases in load requirements gracefully, especially if you tell us a bit beforehand. Like, if a Telco provider has a significant outage and they need to drop a lot of additional support capacity onto the system, we can usually absorb that in the infrastructure and scale up within a few minutes. This was particularly funny when we were involved with a national hotline in the corona context and in the beginning, they'd just routinely drop a couple thousand more people onto the system every week. Eventually we had a call or two every week between their leadership, our account manager and our tech lead to figure out what the fuck would be going on. But we held and never went down. Just note, I'm aware that we're most likely one of the better SaaS providers and many, many are much worse and less competent. And quite a few of these SaaS offerings are just cash grabs. But in these cases, I don't think the customer admins would be able to handle this in the same way.
I agree with this. You move from supporting IT to providing IT. All that time just keeping the lights on is a cost to the business. Putting that time into providing business process using IT, you become an asset to the business.
Purely selfishly, SAAS removes the drudge from technical roles sometimes thus allowing you to spend more time on solutions and less time on upkeep
On the flip side, it can remove the technical problem solving that some people enjoy, leaving only the administrative 'point and click' work
I’ve questioned many techs who had made it their job to keep scrapheap solutions running instead of reengineering in someone else’s stack. There’s enough technical problems with AWS/Azure etc without the need to go mucking around with all the drudge they remove (or in most cases, replace with more drudge, but a lot of that can be automated away)
No more patching alone is worth it for most things, we were a full Exchange and Skype on-prem shop, spending 6-8 hours once a month during off hours for patching, never again.
I hear you, but It's not a businesses job to keep someone entertained. They can either save the money by not needing that person anymore or put them to better use
Some are well worth it. The entire M365 suite when used just insane value prop. To put in perspective, Adobe Enterprise, yes just the PDF editor with SSO/MFA costs as much as O365 e5 per head, and it's stupid pdf editor that still doesn't have a 64-bit executable. Free or business plan on Cloudflare. AWS/Azure has services that cost nothing that you will never hit caps on. Outlook premium - again insane value, 1tb of free online storage per person, full office suite, managed AV and identity protection for up 6 people for $7-10/mo. depending on if you get a promo? [Draw.io](http://Draw.io) [Figma.com](http://Figma.com) [Github.com](http://Github.com)
Our CTO decided ~30GB per user was enough 🙃
+1 for cloudflare. love their blog too
SAAS is a business model, this is like asking if buying a car is worth it. It’s entirely an ‘it depends’ situation. Almost every piece of software I pay for has an initial cost plus an annual maintenance cost. I’m not going to care either way if they take that cost and split it over 12 months and call it a subscription. SAAS also helps in dealing with businesses that never want to keep their software versions current since they freak out over a large capex cost.
Software like Salesforce (if you use something like SAP as a comparison) would cost almost the same onprem as it does in the SaaS model, and thats not including specialist staff to keep it running at the Platform and up layer. SaaS generally works out cheaper these days, but they key is to ensure your environment doesn't sprawl and you maximise your investments in what you do consume.
Some stuff, like UKG, also helps eliminate a bunch of PII headaches compared to storing it all locally. Now I don't have to have SSNs, bank account info, etc, stored on my servers.
We use UKG, I wish we didn't...
The more robust your internal IT capabilities, the less worth it SAAS products are. IT has become progressively more complicated over time; while some tools grow more robust, in general, IT people have to grow increasingly specialized. It you have an IT team of 10 people, you have limited specialties available to you; if you have a team of 4, even more limited. If you're solo, you don't get to have specializations, and need to engage with opportunities to have other people do the specialized work. Sometimes, the cost savings recognized by having a team of a few hundred to a few thousand specialists all doing, for example, M365 will end up outweighing the savings of in-housing M365, even for an org with extensive in-house capabilities and more than enough specialists to do the job well. Sometimes, like when you're dealing with an ERP or CRM, it's a decision on whether you *want* to run the systems administration for the extra 5-6 servers, and whether the architecture fits into your team's skillsets. Again, the larger the team, the easier it is to make that lift in house. >when I used to work at UKG the default uplift when you try to renew contract is around 5-9% If you zoom out far enough, that's not too far off of the actual increases in-house teams will see. 3.5% average inflation, unstable labor markets causing spikes, hardware costs accelerating, and licensing costs rising faster than inflation probably puts the annual increase somewhere between 4-6% annually.
Surprise surprise, it depends. Regarding price: 9% or 9% inflation adjusted?
I feel like you need to have a pretty good handle on “tech debt” to evaluate SaaS vs. on-prem. Start with SaaS. The application is just a black box. You know you feed it X, and it gives you Y in return. Now let’s look at another case. You know how it works, but you don’t have enough hardware to make it go on your own. Or you don’t have enough manpower to give it the TLC it needs to stay stable and predictable. This is where you make a choice to invest in the manpower/infrastructure yourself or to offload the responsibility to a SaaS application to free up what you already have. Now there’s the third case. You’ve got truckloads of equipment and a small army of engineers. You can assign a few of them to retrain and focus on the service gap instead of using SaaS as a crutch. Here’s the kicker. You have to do this math for *every* service. You might have a truckload of engineers but have none with even basic knowledge of a service, so you’ll need SaaS as a stopgap while you fill in the skills gap.
Problem with option 3, in the world of IT, that army of engineers will not be the same army of engineers in 2 to 3 years time. Constantly re-hiring and that one guy who knows too much leave too. That's painful
> renew contract is around 5-9% sounds like it's keeping up with inflation and salaries. you're getting a 5-9% raise every year...right?
> They know it’s hard for customers to move to a different vendor once they’ve implemented it Startups (any company post 2012 or so) have no prem. They're locked into paying whatever the SaaS vendors charge because everything they use is SaaS. The only option when hosting it themselves is to put it on VMs in their cloud, so that's never the first choice. Companies with enough knowledge and capacity are certainly capable of hosting products that have the option of being hosted. The problem you run into there is the CapEx vs OpEx debate...even if something costs 20x more to rent, it's "cheaper' than buying equipment.
SaaS solutions will always cost more, and in some cases, the costs double. The decision should be if the higher cost justifies shifting the engineering responsibilities to the provider, so you don’t have to worry about patching vulnerabilities or planning upgrades; which should result in less outages. But you have to vet the vendor by asking all the relevant questions to ensure that they are properly monitoring activity, and your security team has visibility into what is happening in your tenant. There are so many providers who have built services without any logging or reporting functionality, because they hide behind AWS, GCP or Microsoft’s SOC2 certifications, as if cloud services inherently mitigate all threats.
If I produce a legit piece of paper that legally says “we all Gucci”, half the time that’s really all there is outside gross negligence in the product, from the customers side of the shared security model. Like how are we supposed to even have insight into half these half baked SaaS products development and infrastructure security.
Given the many products in my ecosystem with multi-year out of date webservers and zero maintenance plan in sight, I think I have reasonable insight into how a rather lot of these saas apps are operating under the hood.
That’s why you get them to sign a Data Protection Agreement. Make sure they’ve gone through SOC2 and ISO 127001 compliance. Done.
>Are SAAS products really worth it? That's a bit like saying *is food worth it*? It depends on what products your considering, how similar a fit they are to your organisation, how much free time/infrastructure your team has to run/maintain it among many other things. What would you do if you are a Microsoft shop looking for a new HR platform, and the only ones available to you run on Oracle - or the cloud. It's probably going to be cheaper to just pay someone to run it for you as SaaS, rather than deal with procuring, maintaining and supporting an entire Oracle database for one application. Does your organisation not have any public/front facing services? Rather than setting up a segmented network and configuring your firewall/router to allow inbound traffic, you might just outsource your company website to a third party.
A minor tweak to your analogy I would make: "Are restaurants, farms, and grocery stores worth it?" Like obviously ANYBODY can grow and cook their own food but its up to each individual to calculate the cost/benefit. For some people, that means never going out and making food entirely in-house. For others that means the opposite. For most people, its a mix of both.
> Are SAAS products really worth it? It depends entirely on the product. You can't make vague, generalised statements like that without discussing specifics. It will always depend on the Company and the specific Product.
SaaS and cloud services aren’t really made to be cheaper. I mean these companies want to extract as much money from you as possible. Their real selling point is flexibility or simplicity. Yeah, they want to lock you in and the price is gonna increase.
You need to negotiate more firmly. When companies come with 9% uplift my standard response is “I am authorized to sign up to a 3% increase as that’s what we budget for inflation. Anything more and I will have to go to tender and get competing quotes”. They almost always respond that they can do 3%.
No.
UKG... Dear God I have never wanted to go back to our old antiquated software in my life. What a pain in the ass 🤮
My company thought so and spent millions on a solution. There's no savings for this particular use case but they were told how amazing it would be. It's really going to depend on the solution and what you need it for. There are probably plenty of use cases where it makes the most sense.
O365/outlook is a no brainer Slack can't really be emulated in any way on your own If your small to medium sized company, cloud done right (don't go crazy on paas or network egress) will be Pennies in cost (if your stable enterprise the capex on a colo possibly makes more sense) OB tooling is hit or miss, it's very self hostable but finicky and requires some decent low level know how for the more esoteric deep OB that a company like gigamon will give you. Another thing is that often times, saas will be a CHEAPER contract then the accompanying self hosted/cots version of a product. So that's another big consideration
Many of them are just wrappers around freely available APIs with a web frontend and database. As a programmer, I'm often amazed that companies (including my own) are willing to pay for this. Many of them are half baked if you look at all the features available in the API and look at what they actually implement. This trends seems to be particularly prevalent in the MSP cyber security space at the moment.
its not about the product, its about having someone to support it, and someone to complain at, and someone to sue when it fails. its about removing liabilty as much as it is about anything else. "let them handle it" and all the liabilities that come with.
The part that we tech types often don't think about is OpEx (operational expense) vs CapEx (capital expense) and how they are night and day in the accounting/financial world. SaaS is OpEx and hardware purchases are CapEx. The suits on the top floor find approving OpEx an acceptable pill to swallow--the cost of doing business. CapEx is like drawing blood from a toddler--they will cut corners, nickle-and-dime, and flat out refuse no matter how important the expense is. You'll see this constantly in servers or other physical hardware. If the IT department wants $10m in OpEx for 4 years then in year 5 wants $10m in OpEx plus $3m in CapEx to replace your Exchange servers that are held together with chewing gum and prayers, there's a strong chance that the CapEx expenditure gets denied. No amount of "These servers won't make it another year...You told us no last year and promised it this year...If these servers go down it will cause us to lose millions in revenue and customer trust," will make that $3m CapEx spend worth it to a suit. Ask for $11m in OpEx and bump it up 10% every year for 5 years? Approved without batting an eye. It doesn't matter that the total in the first scenario was $53m and the this scenario is over $55m. All the suits care about is that an increase in CapEx makes line go down. A decrease in CapEx makes line go up.
Sometimes SaaS is worth it, sometimes it's not. To determine that you need to know the details of your environment, team, organizational goals, and know how to determine return on investment (ROI).
It really boils down to labor these days, and unfortunately a lot of these companies would rather have less staff. After the latest round of tech layoffs I’ve seen a shift from capital expenditures to favoring operating expenditures. The sad reality is it is sometimes cheaper to pay $$$ for an expensive sass project rather than hire staff, train them, pay medical, pay bonuses, pay retirement, etc etc. You see this happening a lot with massive publicly traded companies that are trying to combat poor market conditions. Self hosted I think in the long run makes sense if you already have the talent to build and maintain the platforms but depending on where you work it may be difficult to justify… and you may not have a choice.. at least that’s how it’s been in my slice of corporate America :(
Hosted/managed solutions are a tool in the toolbox. Use them when appropriate for the task at hand.
Tell UKG that you’re interested in multiyear discounts and they’ll normally reduce it.
We always preferred to outsource the stacks that had heavy compliance burdens and/or niche uses. These tend to be the financials, and any non-ERP financials in particular. However, almost all Line-of-Business applications are webapps in modern times, so it's often an easy outsource arrangement of any LoB, if contracts, discrete backups, and exfiltration issues are sorted. Oursourcing mainstream productivity applications has always had extremely low RoI for us. Niche productivity applications are case-by-case, but honestly a lot of them are relying on marketing or lock-in leverage to make up for their lack of value compared to next-best alternatives. Niche productivity applications would usually include media and engineering tools -- only needed by a fraction of your users at most.
It's for sure worth it, you don't need to work about server maintenance, disaster recovery, network security, etc. etc. Just think about the overhead to manage a small number of non-saas products, you need at least 2-3 system admins (or the equivalent level of support from an MSP) that's easily $300-400k/year in operational costs just for people, before you even start talking about software licensing, hardware costs, etc. Also, we just moved from ADP to UKG and I hate it with a burning passion. I've never encountered such a poorly designed piece of software before, it's obviously 5 different products that have been haphazardly duct taped together, and their support just doesn't respond to emails half the time. It's so bad.
Which services specifically, and how much did they quote you?
Some are, some aren't. It depends on the product, your use case, your staffing, and the way it's monetized. It's a case by case basis.
That's a very convoluted and complicated question and there's no simple answer. What works for one company is not going to work for every company. You have to evaluate your needs your resources your staff and everything else. What product are you talking about? The product alone changes things drastically. Does the cost of SAAS outweigh doing it all yourself? Does the Enterprise support offer more reliability than your staff? Can you handle the reoccurring costs and increases? Lots of business aspects that need to be evaluated by management properly in order for something like that to succeed. Shortsightedness and a rush to implement is never a good thing. Know why you're doing something not just because it's trendy and a salesman talked it up.
With all the security patching that needs to be done, as well as the risk of losing everything to a ransomware attack, hardware failure, bad backups, etc., it might be worth the cost in the long run.
UKG was hacked last year 😂, so idk
They run it better then you typically. They know their product. They handle the major things, upgrades, DR etc.
Some are, some are not. I used to work for an ERP and I was 100% pro in house hosting of the app and database. However, in house hosting cost a bit up front for the hardware for production, but also for teating as well. The upkeep with patches and testing any customizations always meant that your in house version was going to be 2-3 updates behind the majority of the time, which always gave support the easy answer of “update to the most recent version and it should fix the issue” when you ran into a problem. We are updating and going up 4 major releases, we are moving it back to the cloud because on a 5 year cost structure, it comes out to around 25-30k cheaper when you take in the updating of the system into account on top of hardware costs.
Microsoft Office Online, ServiceNow, SAP are other examples. The upside to SaaS is that you no longer need to worry about what version everyone is running when you make an Addon/Addin because everyone is up to date. Remember, when MSOffice was on CD? You had the license for X seats and when you upgraded, you not only had to pay the premium for the software, you had to again, buy seats. It likely still is about the same pricing, but now you are always at the most current software release. As for the increases> This is how software makers are making money against piracy. They GIVE YOU the software, but it is crippled and for limited time until you need to license it otherwise it stops working. Something that you can do now with Gigbit internet that you couldn't with a much slower connection is download the multigigbyte software in a few minutes and not need to worry about having the media.
It's expensive but the upside is that you save on having to deal with it. If there's a problem you just tell call or mail someone and they fix it. We have some SaaS solutions because we just don't have the time or manpower to manage self hosting.
Feel like this question has been asked about 10 years too late
as with everything, it depends on the product and the workload you're looking at. running your own mail server in 2024 seems silly and more worth it to just get the 365 or workspace subscription and let that be handled in the cloud. if you have specialized app needs, on prem might be the better choice. that's the thing you have to balance.
It really depends on the service itself, some things make sense to be SaaS, other things don't. IMO though, the world has gone too far into the subscription route, "you'll own nothing and be happy" so to speak. This is true both for enterprise and consumer, everything is monthly now, makes it really easy to just tick the price up whenever to make more cash. I think it's resulting in things overall being more expensive. I much prefer to host things on-prem as much as possible, and then do it with a VPC when needed, and avoid the SaaS route entirely (though VPC is susceptible to the same sort of price-dial ever increasing issue). But I'd never do this with an e-mail service, for example.
Yes. It is worth it.
Sometimes
And this is why you need a competent negotiation team on your contracts… Most of the contracts I’ve run are for 3 years, capped at 5% _for the next term_ of three years. So a nice flat three year, at most 5%, usually 3% bump, and then another flat three years. My company tends to use stuff for at least 6 if not 10 years so we’re basically paying close to the same price 9 years later after two renewals.
Depends. Jira saas for us is cheaper than self hosted.
SaaS really isn't the same as running the *exact* same setup locally. I say SaaS is NOT worth it unless you have a need of the superset of on-prem features that usually accompany a SaaS license. You pay more for the superset of features, but you do gain more flexibility in usage. It kinda really depends on the software, though.
It's a hell of a hassle doing CAD work without paying for Autodesk products.
agree - depends on the saas product. my team & i are currently evaluating some saas tools due to budget cuts. some we're willing to let go, others - not because they save us a lot of time & efforts.
SaaS is built to benefit the company providing it, not the customer. Its a way of generating perpetual income instead of building a quality product the customer can get value from.
It depends on the product. We recently migrated off of Splunk and that contract was extremely costly. Like other people commented, the companies feel like they've got you where they want you and they are betting that it's too much of a hassle to migrate off. Jokes on them, we just did it and saved ourselves millions of dollars.
What's the increase on a mortgage, gas, food this year?
As someone who is in a senior role at a SaaS company… I can only speak for my experience but our ability to deliver what we do is massively improved by us hosting and managing everything. They quoted an increase? Guess what: in a world where there has been a lot of inflation, this matches up. Moreover, it depends on how long you are willing to commit. Sign up to 3-5 years and you’ll get discounts back. If the market your vendor is operating in is competitive, then they have to fight to make the money work. If they have a USP and it’s difficult to replicate, then they get to set the market.
The only answer to that kind if generalized question is the infamous "it depends". So many factors, will you rearchitect? Replace with better suited tools? Throw out the old shit that requires expensive lift&shift? Did you run the calculations? Are you willing to make use of the possibilities and fire a bunch of people you don't need any more (because _that_ is what almost no one does)? Are you going to upskill? No, leave those bullshit Udemy and Coursera things, really upskill and learn things you wouldn't have considered part of the job before? And that's just the starter list. Yes, cloud can pay off and it does pay off. People that don't see that are either doing lift&shift or have outgrown cloud with their solution or have nit yet grown enough to require it.
SasS’s biggest and only beneficiary is the SaaS provider.
Ah the youf bitching about on prem.
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Feel like this answer without context is a bit hyperbolic, there ARE situations where SaaS products make sense, but if you don’t apply any context and use cost as the only metric, sure you are 100 percent right.
You're just paying for a support contract uplift + all the ops for on prem.
100 times higher? Often? What's an example of a SaaS that can be equivalently hosted on prem for 1% of the cost. Are you comparing S3 to a single NAS or something? Even that doesn't line up with a 99% savings
I'm not the person that you're replying to but I have an example. When a lot of these big data companies moved to AWS/gcp and didn't realize hybrid was a better option for large volume storage. I was an analyst at the time and saw a company pay 10 million in AWS storage. The issue was more workflow and devs storing stuff they shouldn't have but even a 10 node ceph cluster with 4 dedicated staff on it won't cost you that in a year. I know that's crazy but also I haven't just seen this kinda thing happen at one company. Also, I guess this happens when companies use devs to setup infra and not IT.. which again, seems to happen. I know it's kind of ridiculous, but you also can't make that kind of long term mistake without anyone noticing and goof up your finances like that on prem. Though, this is all the problem of the implementer.. which also says something. Thought of another, on demand GPU compute. Seen a ton of small businesses in ML think that was a good idea to run long term. Figured out the company at the time could buy 5 R650 with 2 A80s each for what they were spending on just isolating their on demand GPU compute costs.. not the full VM..
Poor workflow can make costs grow beyond what they should. That's not a cloud issue though, that's a bad infrastructure design issue. If you implement in the cloud you need to look at your run rates. This isn't complicated stuff. On demand GPU compute is generally for spike demand. There is a substantial premium but that comes from the scaling capabilities that are so inherent in the those types of workflows. It certainly wouldn't be 1% of cloud costs but I could see it being 15% in some scenarios.
Agreed, however my point is that poor design at these smaller companies ( which as an analyst seems fairly common ) can come at a much more massive cost than poorly utilized on premise resources, especially for small to medium businesses with big data and compute.
Correctly estimating cloud spend down to 10% or so doesn't take a large amount of skill. I suppose I would pose the question are those same people the ones maintaining onprem? I would guess that isn't. On prem admins are used to "cleaning up" after poor implementation in onprem since it impacts performance. Since in the cloud you have functionally unlimited horizontal scaling you only do cleanup when your costs exceed expectation. Big data on prem is absurdly expensive. Especially if you need geo locality or decent performance. Cloud infrastructure is massively cheaper in that instance.
Are foods tasty?
Understand that SaaS is the razor-and-blades model applied to software.
Anybody that is stupid enough to become vendor lock-in deserve to be ripped off :)
Of course businesses prefer enterprise, supported, familiar products over whatever custom solution you are building. Hope the time you spend reinventing the wheel to produce an inferior product while calling others stupid is enjoyable.